A minor update to TigerPay for Stripe is awaiting Apple’s approval. This update fixes an issue where non-16-digit credit cards that should be accepted by Stripe were not able to be charged with the app.

I’ll drop another post here once I do the inevitable back-and-forth with Apple. It normally takes me at least two attempts to make them happy with any update’s approval. 😉

Among other things lately, when I have some time, I am still chipping away at new and interesting things for TigerPay, with an update coming soon, sometime within a month (that’s what I’m aiming for). The next update brings two extremely major feature introductions into the product:

This morning, I am pleased to present PREVIEW screenshots of the receipt sending feature, specifically the new setup tab created for it. Internally, this feature does already function as intended, and (naturally) this tab and its controls are being developed with accessibility in mind…

Screenshot on the iPad: (also tested on the new iPad!)

Screenshots on the iPhone:

These screenshots, for the visually impaired among us, show the tab that is used to set up the user’s information. This information is used to set up a form letter e-mail you can send (choice on a transaction-by-transaction basis) and edit per-transaction to send information (including receipt-type details) to your customers.

Again, look for more news on this update in the coming days and weeks, my target time to release the new version is within a month of this update.

Up front warning: this is a very geek-oriented guide, and is specifically meant for iOS app developers with more than one Mac, if you don’t fall within those requirements you’re probably not gonna get much out of this write-up. Sorry, if that’s the case, best to just pass this one over for your reading list.

So, you’re working on this massive iOS app, and it takes forever to compile on your main work machine. Maybe you’re like me and your main work machine is a lowly Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4gHz Mac Mini, or, maybe you’re not even that fortunate. Maybe your main work machine’s a MacBook Air, those aren’t fast either, but that’s actually kind of the point. But, if you’re like me, you’ve got more than one Mac. Imagine how cool it would be to be able to use all of your Macs to distribute (and incredibly increase the performance) of compiling your apps for iOS?

If you’re already familiar with Xcode’s “Distributed Builds” feature in Xcode 4.2, you may or may not know, those settings aren’t actually going to work for your non-Mac app build processes. However, not to fear either way, this snazzy little guide will quickly walk you through setting up Distributed Builds to work with both Mac and iOS app build operations via Xcode’s interface.

Since a mixture of Apple dragging their heels and myself needing to stop the heel-dragging in the middle to upload a new copy of the app update is leading to yet more heel-dragging on the release of the update to TigerPay, I figured I’d whet my audience’s appetite for more information, and let loose with the (fairly short but still quite noteworthy) list of changes to be seen in the upcoming update…

NOW RUNS OPTIMIZED ON THE IPAD!!!

+ Fixes an issue where charging an amount without a cents amount wasn’t charged correctly (was charged as cents instead of dollars). + Fixes issues with improper bottom tab bar icons and titles. + Fixes a minor problem that could result in certain improper dollar amounts with cents being passed onto Stripe for processing when we really should’ve caught them locally.

Again, I’m basically just waiting for Apple’s approval on the update to release it to the public, I hope this will happen within a week’s time. But we’ll just have to wait and see.

Enjoy!
–Quinn

UPDATE #1: I flubbed on the auto-Tweet. Let’s try this again. 😉

UPDATE #2: Remove the pre formatting tags from the change log. It didn’t render properly in my site design.

After much waiting and futzing around with Apple’s app approval process, I am pleased to announce, TigerPay is now available! You can now use everybody’s favorite mobile phone as a mobile credit card processing terminal with a credit card processing service that genuinely has its users’ best interests at heart!

TigerPay is the incredibly simple and cost-effective credit card processing terminal that runs right on your iPhone!

Using the independently-owned and extremely competitively-priced Stripe.com credit card processing service, you simply sign up for a free Stripe.com account and provide them with your payout information, then enter your Stripe.com API key into TigerPay. That’s all there is to it, after that, you’re ready to accept credit card payments.

If you’re an individual or small business owner who’s fed up with the lack of affordable ways to accept credit card payments, or if you’re looking for a better option for processing your customers’ credit card charges, TigerPay may be the option you’ve been looking for. Stripe’s free-to-use service only takes a very small (30 cents + 2.9 percent) per-transaction charge out of the transaction to cover their expenses, and within 7 days average, the proceeds are deposited to your bank account.

I am pleased to announce that I am waiting for Apple to approve my first iPhone/iPod OS app for inclusion into the iTunes App Store. This app, called TigerPay, will allow you to leverage the Stripe payment processing service, to charge your customers’ credit cards, wherever your iPhone or iPod Touch has Internet access.

This app will be a welcome option to you, if you are a business owner. The two following situations come to mind as great examples:

Situations such as being a seller at a flea market, farmer’s market, or festival-type atmosphere where your business could benefit from immediately taking a customer’s credit card payment without your traditional desk and/or point-of-sale setup.

This is also a fantastic option if you were considering a traditional mobile credit card processor appliance. Simply sign up for Stripe, fill out all their required account details, load the app on your iPhone or iPod (which I’m sure you already love) and take their payment. Within about a week of each payment processing request on your part, Stripe sends the money to your bank account. Furthermore, Stripe’s rates are incredibly competitive, and by supporting their service you fund a team of developers who make a payment processor that is easy to implement, user-friendly, and their team is always open and willing to listen to any feedback you may have.

As I’ve previously stated, this app is still pending approval by Apple. Once the app is approved, I will, of course update my blog with an official release notice.

I would like to express my thanks to one of my customers who pointed out to me that the QuinnEbert.NET contact form has been broken for some time. I have replaced the existing WordPress module with one that should be seeing much better support going forward. Furthermore, I have tested the new form. It appears contacting me should now work again as originally intended. My apologies to anybody who had issues with the previous system.

So, recently, I have realized that the Spotlight (file searching and indexing system) on my Mac running OS X 10.7 (Lion) is totally killing my Mac Mini’s performance when I’m doing high-demand tasks like compiling MacPorts packages in a Terminal session. I have a sneaking suspicion, though I have not verified, that this is due to some fairly severe Spotlight bugs that still remain in Lion. Desperate to try and reclaim what I estimate to be the 60%-70% loss of system performance caused by Spotlight’s indexing facilities constantly hounding any disk activity it sees and constantly grinding away at my hard disk, I did some online research, and found some fairly simple steps you can take if you’re like me and you want to see a 50% or more gain in system performance. That being said, these steps won’t be for everybody, especially since they keep Spotlight from updating your file search results. Again, if you regularly rely on the upper-right-hand or Finder window search features, these steps are NOT for you, and sadly, you will just have to wait and see if Apple fixes Spotlight indexing bugs in future Lion updates.

Just wanted to make folks aware that I have just posted an updated version of my Stripe payment processor for Mal’s E-commerce integration package.

The following two changes have been made:

Payment status checking now uses stripe.js for instant and intelligent feedback on the usability of the customer’s credit card information. This cuts down on occurrences of Mal’s E-commerce presenting your customer with the “did not complete order” type page (whose text, incidentally, is the option you set under “Thank You Message”).

Variable data sent to and from Mal’s E-commerce is now subjected to a pass of htmlentities() to reduce chances of XSS attacks.

The existing download URL already points to the newly updated package, if you don’t already have the link:

After hearing back from the folks at Stripe (with some valid minor concerns — mainly concerns from Mal’s E-commerce’s perspective) I have made a few minor modifications to the Stripe4Mal package. While the issues addressed are ones that are likely to not to see any great exploitative use, as a white hat security guy, I can’t help but to take such advisement to heart.

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